Nanomedicine: A Promising Avenue for the Development of Effective Therapy for Breast Cancer

Abstract

Purpose: Breast cancer is the most probable cancer among women. However, the available treatment is based on targeting different stages of breast cancer viz., radiation therapy, hormonal therapy, chemotherapy, and surgical interventions, which have some limitations. The available chemotherapeutics are associated with problems like low solubility, low permeability, high first-pass metabolism, and P-glycoprotein efflux. Hence, the aforementioned restrictions lead to ineffective treatment. Multiple chemotherapeutics can also cause resistance in tumors. So, the purpose is to develop an effective therapeutic regimen for the treatment of breast cancer by applying a nanomedicinal approach.

Methods: This review has been conducted on a systematic search strategy, based on relevant literature available on Pub Med, MedlinePlus, Google Scholar, and Sciencedirect up to November 2019 using keywords present in abstract and title of the review. As per our inclusion and exclusion criteria, 226 articles were screened. Among 226, a total of 40 articles were selected for this review.

Results: The significant findings with the currently available treatment is that the drug, besides its distribution to the target-specific site, also distributes to healthy cells, which results in severe side effects. Moreover, the drug is less bioavailable at the site of action; therefore, to overcome this, a high dose is required, which again causes side effects and lower the benefits. Nanomedicinal approaches give an alternative approach to avoid the associated problems of available chemotherapeutics treatment of breast cancer.

Conclusion: The nanomedicinal strategies are useful over the conventional treatment of breast cancer and deliver a target-specific drug-using different novel drug delivery approaches.

Keywords: Breast cancer; bioavailability; chemotherapeutics; nanomedicine.; receptor targets; side effects.